BEIJING — At Wang Sufang’s shop on the outskirts of Beijing, you can buy a red Mercedes, a two-story modern villa and a small horse, all for less than about $79.

The only catch is that to enjoy them, you have to be dead.

The luxuries that Ms. Wang sells are paper versions, traditionally burned by Chinese as offerings to the dead in the hope that their presence will ease the travails of the afterlife.

In the old days, all that the dead could hope for was paper “heaven money,” or perhaps a bit of food. But with economic growth, variety and quality are matching the ambitions of China’s new rich.

Now, the offerings are getting out of hand, with one “graveyard shop” in the city of Nanjing selling paper Viagra, newspapers reported this week amid calls for the authorities to take action.

“The people who make this stuff are definitely lacking in taste and civilization,” the Nanjing Morning News reported local people as saying.

Burial rituals go back a long way in China, with the terracotta warriors only the most spectacular of a history of accompaniments for the dead.

Burning flowers and paper money, and more elaborate gifts, is a popular folk tradition that survived even the Maoist era’s dislike of “feudal beliefs.”

Nevertheless, it has never come fully back into the open. Apart from areas around graveyards, shops often cluster in unfashionable outskirts of cities, like Ms. Wang’s shop in southwest Beijing. A paper wreath in the windows normally indicates what is on sale, while staff members are reluctant to discuss their business.

Last year, China’s deputy minister for civil affairs, Dou Yupei, said he intended to ban at least the more extreme forms.

If he got anywhere, it was not as far as Nanjing, a former capital west of Shanghai. The Morning News reporters, on a tour of the city in advance of the Grave-Sweeping Festival next month, found paper laptop computers and mobile phones, credit cards, travelers’ checks, and passports.

But money is nothing without life’s — and death’s — little pleasures. “At one suburban graveyard, they found call girls, condoms, and Viagra.”